Jeane:In my dream it feels like I’m living in a room on an estate. Everything seems to be right there for me. I’ve had a baby; I think it’s a male, but I’m not sure. I think the father is Jack Nicholson, or someone like him; he visits occasionally – by coming down from the sky.

When I had the baby, I didn’t really know the father’s true nature, but he’s a bit on the dark side. When he visits, I always keep myself between the baby and him.

The next time he visits, I find myself swirling around in this giant, shallow sink, and I think that’s when I wake up.

John: I saw the meaning of this dream right off the bat, but the difficulty is, how do I describe it?

You’re dealing with a force in the outer world (represented by Jack Nicholson) that’s part of the ego-identity illusion. You also have the reciprocal, inner force, in the form of the baby. You’re standing in between them, protecting the baby.

For whatever reason you’ve chosen the image of Jack Nicholson to represent the outer world, perhaps because he has such a powerful identity.

Jeane: It’s almost like I want to start taking the baby out into the world, but I feel confined a bit by the Jack Nicholson energy.

John: Exactly. This image is another example of “solitude in the crowd,” or “head in the heavens, feet on the ground,” or however you’d say that. You’re using an image that has the schematic of this dichotomy between the spiritual and the physical, or the inner and the outer. The baby represents an essence, and Jack Nicholson represents an ego-type, external identification, and you’re caught in between.

So you’re neither the essence, nor the identification and, as a result, you’re in a state of amnesia. The baby is the unconscious part of you, and Jack Nicholson is the part that tries to keep involving you in making choices based in personal indulgences (psychologies, old patterns, etc.) in terms of your relationship to people and things around you.

It’s much like your dream earlier in the night (see The Lost Essence), in that you’re trying to understand how to make a fundamental shift that, really, all humans should be working toward. This is a shift from being based, as a being, in the personal, egocentric “I’m separate” view, where life consists in our personal reactions to events in the outer world, to being present in the outer world, but based in the inner, universe-connected part of us.

Your dreams don’t have the specificity of an answer, they just show the conundrum from an overall perspective, which is the way the feminine sees things (the masculine would present this issue through specific details). The image shows you have the sense of something so much more (the baby), but at the same time you’re not quite able to catch up with it because you also have the circumstances of this outer scenario (JN) that you’re taking into account.

So how do you pull the two together? How does everything come back to just the essence and yet, at the same time, you don’t destroy the creation (physical world) with the light. In other words, how do exist in the essence without disturbing anything?

Very unusual and peculiar. See, it’s very much like that “poof” dream at the beginning. The interesting thing about experiencing a dream image like this is it keeps you from taking things too seriously because, by and large, you always have the inner echo to remind you that the outer world is just an appearance or mannerism.

There’s always something behind the mannerism or appearance that has to do with where it’s coming from (the essence). The more we connect with the essence of things, the harder it becomes to take the appearance or the mannerism of the outer literally. If we catch up with the essence, on an inner level, then we’ll see what’s causing everything in the outer world to unfold.

When we experience life at this deeper level, it’s like we’re creating, or co-creating, the world we experience. No, we’re actually creating. This co-creation thing isn’t quite right, because we are God. It’s hidden inside us. We can’t not be everything.

God divides Himself completely, which means that there’s no division. God is always whole and complete in and of Himself. If we can catch up with it in us, then we’re also catching up with that which is at the center of the universe, which is the essence of everything.

We’re the Big Bang, or whatever science wants to call it. We’re all of that, but it’s hard to denote because we’re caught in a magic trick, like in your dream, where you have the baby, which is the essence, and you have the raw energy of things that capture your attention, which is the Jack Nicholson outer, and you’re somewhere in between.

So, we’re always caught in something like that. Our relationship to the outer is informed by our five senses, but our relationship to the inner comes through an emptiness connection from the heart, or from the essence. It’s that inner part that’s always making a journey, not what we’re doing in relation to our outer environment.

Again, it’s a big overall dream, at such a level and of such magnitude that it’s like a trance. It’s not something that you can take and say “I’ve got it!” in one fell swoop. But it is a good representation of how things really are.